oboe and digital soundtrack
Duration: 4'55"
Sussurrando, meaning whispering or murmuring, received its title from the soft, highly sibilant background of rapidly articulated oboe samples that permeate the piece. The form of this work, like many of my electronic works, is simple and easily discerned (A - B - A' (development) - A - Coda). The piece was written for, and dedicated to Nancy Argersinger, who provided the oboe samples for the preparation of the tape. Having written a work for oboe and piano previously, I felt drawn to combine those two instruments in electronic form. The tape part consists of oboe and piano samples ranging from standard pitches to extended techniques, such as oboe multiphonics, key clicks, and scraped piano strings. The samples are used in recognizable and/or radically altered forms. Many of the compositional techniques are traditional, but taken to extremes. The piece utilizes principles of augmentation and diminution, making use of the extreme compression or expansion ratios provided by computer processing. For example, single note gestures in the development section are highly compressed versions of the entire opening section, while the murmuring oboe background of the opening section is finally slowed down enough in the coda to be recognizable as a series of arpeggios. Even certain samples, radically slowed down provided unusual sources of material, such as the underlying percussive sound in the slow section, derived from slowing an oboe note down enough to hear the plates of the reed hitting each other. The tape portion of Sussurrando was realized using a wide gamut of resources available in a modern computer music facility -- samplers, MIDI sequencers, Csound, and even linear predictive coding (LPC) to combine aspects of an oboe multiphonic with scraped piano string. The tape portion of Sussurrando was realized at the Indiana University Center for Electronic and Computer Music.
Sussurrando is released on New Music from Indiana Vol. 1